On Thursday, Yahoo pledged to be a site that goes with users, rather than a destination on the Web, with the release of what it said were faster and better mail and search products.

Yahoo Mail is now twice as fast and easier to navigate, said Blake Irving, who has spent 100 days at Yahoo as an executive vice president and chief product officer. Mail has been rearchitected from the ground up, from UI to architectural changes, better SMS, with better creation of folders, all using unlimited storage and up to 25 Mbyte attachments.

Twitter will also be integrated. If you find content on a Yahoo site, you will be able to comment via your Twitter feed right from that content, Irving said. As an example, he pulled up a restaurant ad and a news story, each with Twitter boxes that allow for commenting, even on ads.

He also talked up the company's iPad app. A stock page, for example, is much different, with more interactivity than the PC. There's even an iPad alarm clock. "The way you interact with an iPad mail client is just different," he said.

The Yahoo search experience will also be more visually appealing and allow users to act on search results, Irving said. "If I search on 'Toy Story 3," I want to buy a ticket as soon as I'm done with that."

That search includes right hand tabs with more content; Yahoo has also worked to get trending topics front-and-center in search results, Irving said.

Yahoo, of course, no longer provides its own search technology, but uses the Microsoft Bing technology on the back end. According to Shahshi Seth, the new vice president of search at Yahoo, the Microsoft relationship frees Yahoo from crawling and amassing an index of sites, and instead lets it "focus on the next generation of search, not just about cosmetic changes.

"In the next three years, I don't think it will be anything or look like anything we have today," Seth said.

Irving agreed. "You're going to be seeing some changes over the next few years. We're going to be faster, we're going to be more iterative," with a faster shipping cycle, he said.

Irving also said that Yahoo's strength was its hundreds of researchers and its labs organization, which are busy crafting new products.

"At a lot of companies when they have a labs organization, there's a wall between these two things with very little connective tissue," Irving said. But ideas generated on the research team flows through to the product team, he said, inspiring real-world changes in the product.

"We're going to be iterating much more frequently then we do today," Irving said. "You're going to see us focus more on a 'one Yahoo, not disparate properties.'"

"Yahoo is something you take with you as opposed to a place you go," Irving said. "People think of Yahoo as a destination, but you're going to be taking Yahoo with you." He pledged to bring harmony between advertisers and consumers.

Trends in the U.S. include faster networks, which allow people walking across town to do things that they would be unlikely to conceive of five years ago, Irving said. Applications are spanning mobile phones to PCs, with mobile devices driving innovation, including social networks, which have expanded beyond just a single site.

"Real social relationships that people are going to be taking out of sites," taking relationships with the user, Irving said. Richness and immersion is becoming more commonplace, he said, and consumers and advertisers want richer experiences.

The goal is to bring personal meaning to the Web," and there's a lot of assets and techniques that Yahoo can deploy to do just that, Irving said.

These include building an ecosystem, where Yahoo surfaces relevant products in relevant ways; including taking or borrowing a bit of content form other sites and building personal relevance via science and data, where Yahoo infers what customers want.

But to do so, Yahoo has to know who a Yahoo is, and that's a problem of logging in, Irving said. Fifty percent of Yahoo's users log in on a monthly basis. Over the next three years Yahoo will strive for 100 percent authentication, he said. How? Yahoo will begin to honor Facebook logins, Twitter IDs, and make the needed customizations.

Yahoo will also try to be where the customer goes, including investing and launching products first in mobile before the PC, Irving said. A lot of companies simply port desktop products to mobile; "those days are over," Irving said. "In fact, I think in five years people will type more on glass (phones) than on clickety-clack keyboards."

Yahoo also wants to own the social experience. Social isn't over, Irving said. There is a model in the real world., where people share common interests with different friends, such as golf or video games. There has been "powerful" thinking to try and do this and make it natural. "There is no reason that I can't take those small groups of friends outside the Yahoo network that are a small number of circles, of Venn diagrams, and take them with me."

Finally, Yahoo wants to "engage and delight," Irving said. If Yahoo doesn't have best-in-class services, including news, sports, mail and messaging across a variety of devices, people won't engage with Yahoo's sites, he said.

"We're not talking about the distant future. A lot of the work has been done far longer than my 100 days within the company," Irving said.

Mark Hachman Mark joined ExtremeTech in 2001 as the news editor, after rival CMP/United Media decided at the time that online news did not make sense in the new millennium.
Mark stumbled into his career after discovering that writing the great American novel did not pay a monthly salary, and that his other possible career choice, physics, required a degree of mathematical prowess that he sorely lacked.
Mark talked his way into a freelance assignment at CMP’s Electronic Buyers’ News, in 1995, where he wrote the...
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